New Aspirus Health Hospital in Chippewa Falls Completed

Chippewa Falls area residents gathered at the new Aspirus Health Hospital site on Thursday for a long-awaited ribbon cutting ceremony.

Construction work on the new facility officially broke ground a little over a year ago as local residents struggled with inadequate access to healthcare services as a result of the HSHS closures. Speaking at the ribbon cutting ceremony on Thursday, Aspirus Wisconsin Northwest Region President Jason Troxell celebrated the return of many of those services in the community.

"We have listened to the community," he said. "And this project is a direct response to what you told us. The community has told us that we want local options for healthcare. And you deserve the absolute best in those local options, which is why we are here today. This project is a major step forward for the Chippewa Valley."

The now completed 35,000-square-foot facility sits on a 22 acre site along Chippewa Crossing Boulevard, and includes an emergency department, 10 treatment rooms, 10 inpatient beds, and an on-site clinic with 12 treatment rooms. Troxell also added that construction speed was a significant part of their development plan because Chippewa Falls residents were left without a hospital at all following the St. Joseph's closure, with nearly half of the new facility being constructed elsewhere and shipped to the site for installation.

"The closure of those two hospitals is kind of like a huge loss in your gut, knowing that your healthcare is closing and you don't have access," he said. "So for us, we knew that we had to do it fast. So that was the reason of, we don't want this to be this longstanding lack of access to care. We know we couldn't replace the entire loss, but we know we could provide great quality care to the community and we knew we could do it quickly."

The new Aspirus Health Hospital will officially begin seeing patients on Tuesday.